Benevolent_Rain
Founder @ anonymous
— I engineer ambitious ideas until they survive the battlefield of reality —
I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and have also done work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a nacent Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts whether helping to build one wind farm at a time was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
1 - I think it is good to be sceptical about this. I guess you've read about Pascal's mugging and other related topics. I am happy you keep this debate alive as it's not really settled.
2 - Yeah look at mirror bacteria, which is just one example of engineered, environment-to-human threats (air turning toxic)
3 - I think this is a useful intuition, but it also has limits. That said, there are step changes in history, such as powered flight invented only after thousands of years of longing and attempts by humans. This is about step changes in technology. If you believe DNA is the code of life, it is not a large leap to believe we can create really bad stuff. And it has happened before, like the great oxygenation event that ~killed all previous biological life on earth.
But basically, please be skeptical - it is super healthy!
Hi! What do you think about x-risk cause prioritization showing that regardless of whether the chance of a pandemic is 0.1% or 10%, the enormous size of the future makes this worthwhile anyway, especially given tractable solutions? Asking as I think the crux for working on biosec is less about how likely something is to happen, than what might happen. I am really happy with the recent clarification on E2H, but still feel like the low protection needed is under explained, meaning I think the lowest confidence from my point of view is whether current plans builds sufficient protection. That said, I would agree with "we don't know what protection level is required, but let's start building what we can, some protection is better than none".
Halycon too I realized.
Please list any new funding opportunities you can think of here on the Forum? I feel like we might already be in the early ramp-up to significantly more EA aligned funding. At the same time, the Forum's overview over funding opportunities feels like it is quickly getting outdated. I think as things move quickly, coordination might become looser and new promising interventions are identified, it is helpful for people to have a good overview over available funding sources and their priorities.
I have heard on the grapevine there is already funding on several fronts that might not be very public. I am a little bit uncertain if perhaps it is better these sources remain anonymous. At the same time, I think there might be several promising EA projects that are not sufficiently visible to people influencing funding decisions.
Epistemic note: I am not listing these yet as I have not had time yet to verify how much they qualify as EA funding opportunities.
Here are a few recent developments I am considering listing on the funding opportunities page, but would like someone that knows these funds better to list them:
Would those who disagree or down vote this and Tobias' previous post please provide some more information? I realize you might want to remain anonymous, so perhaps please just agree vote on this comment if you think someone should copy paste the the reasons for disagreement or downvotes from my previous post on biodefense that also received useful criticism.
Is it dying though? Maybe I have some filter I forgot to turn off but on new and upvoted posts, 5 out of the 6 highest karma ones are about EA criticism (including this one!) as well as global health and animal welfare. Anecdotal, but perhaps hopeful? Maybe there is more diversity and epistemic humility than we get from the podcasts and other sources biased towards funder priorities? If that is true, how can we stay in touch with this? It feels kind of like regular news media dominated by wars and accidents while the world is also amazing and getting better.
There is a possibly optimistic outcome here: That some significant portion of future donations will be put towards epistemic cultivation, criticism and diversity of thought in EA. In a sense, I think the Survival and Flourishing ecosystem is already spearheading interesting directions here, with a focus on AI epistemic tooling. Hopefully more will follow in diverse but similar directions, also looking to serve the EA community, or the questions we used to ask.
Chakras sound pretty theistic lol. But love this piece. On projecting neuroses - do you think a ~playful attitude might help? While still being serious about producing good work (I guess serious about playing?), but maybe a bit more "detached" or "integrated" (I don't know if play means more or less integration personally). Also thinking play and scout mindset (perhaps collaboration too) might go together - kids usually seem less willing to die on an idealistic hill than adults.
Was at EAG, "no seats left" on all AI talks, "57 seats left" on the biosec ones. Fully agree with others that biosec field building seems underserved. Anecdotal but perhaps illustrative. Thanks CEA for another event full of amazing people.
I'm interested in advice on retirement savings - mine are far smaller than Jeff's and reading this gives me slight anxiety haha. It would be action-guiding for me as maybe I should just not push myself to donate more and instead have a more solid retirement plan. Kudos to you Jeff on being transparent and generous!